Why Education Won't Be a 1992 Campaign Issue

By George Kaplan

The Great Education Debate of the 1992 Presidential race was over before it began. Nobody showed up, not even an "education President'' running for re-election. The media spotlight that could have transformed school reform into a front-rank campaign issue never got a clear fix on it.

Yet the timing was ideal. In a first for modern Presidential campaigns, the schools materialized near the top of everyone's worry list. Candidates who once shunned the cant of reform became familiar with it. And at long last we didn't face a weekly lineup of foreign crises to distract us from the home front's tormenting realities.

Despite the absence of weighty debate, interest groups, handlers, and speechwriters will have served up 57 varieties of remedies for the malaises of the schools before the general election in November. They will leave us unmoved. As always, education won't wash as a prime-time, front-line campaign theme. Even the most avid political junkies will switch channels when the oratory veers in its direction. As a national political theme, the schools rate only slightly higher than the...